Showing posts from category disaster relief.
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Watch: Frederick Burkle on Lessons from Haiti and Professionalizing Humanitarian Assistance
›April 20, 2011 // By Schuyler Null“Haiti – in terms of coordination – was a debacle,” said Frederick Burkle, senior fellow with the Harvard Humanitarian Initiative and a visiting scientist at the Harvard School of Public Health. Burkle, who is also a senior public policy scholar at the Wilson Center, said that after the 2010 earthquake, “the large majority of people who showed up were under the age of 30 and this was their first disaster event.”
As a result, “best practices did not necessarily occur,” Burkle said. “Ninety-five percent of the work is probably done by 45 of the major NGOs,” but, he said, the number of “mom-and-pop shows” and other small NGOs in “The Republic of NGOs” is in the thousands.
Non-healthcare providers ended up providing services that they were not trained to provide – even amputations, Burkle said. “We certainly relish the humanitarian spirit of those who show up, but we have to have some coordination to ensure that best practices occur and that it goes in the right direction.”
“The professionalization blueprint really calls for courses, curriculum, and best practice standards,” said Burkle. The Harvard Humanitarian Initiative is working with the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, World Health Organization, and others to provide these resources.
“There’s a movement afoot within the humanitarian community itself to finally professionalize the humanitarian profession,” Burkle said, spurred on, in part, by the poorly coordinated responses to events like the Haiti earthquake. -
Is the Glass Half Full or Half Empty?
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The much-anticipated Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review(QDDR) demands to be taken seriously. Its hefty 250 pages present a major rethink of both American development policy and American diplomacy. Much of it is to be commended:
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Mapping the “Republic of NGOs” in Haiti
›One year after the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti, InterAction has teamed up with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s Business Civic Leadership Center and FedEx to launch the Haiti Aid Map, an interactive visual mapping platform of individual aid projects being conducted in Haiti. The goals of the map are to increase aid transparency, facilitate partnerships, and help NGOs and others better coordinate and allocate resources to aid relief and reconstruction efforts.
With an estimated 10,000 NGOs operating on the ground – the second largest per capita in the world – Haiti has been referred to as “a republic of NGOs.” The Haiti Aid Map is an effort to help the humanitarian community – which has been criticized for lack of accountability, poor transparency, and corruption – better coordinate its response.
The map features 479 projects being operated all over the country by 77 local and international NGOs, most of which are InterAction members. Projects can be browsed by location, sector, or organization and include information on project donors, budgets, timelines, and the number of people reached by the project.While InterAction’s map covers their donors’ response, it leaves out the thousands of government and other NGO projects being conducted in Haiti. USAID recently released a map of U.S. government projects in Haiti (see right) by sector and location.
“The goal is not to rebuild Haiti but to build a different Haiti,” said Sam Worthington, President and CEO of InterAction, speaking exactly one year after the earthquake struck at the map’s formal launch this month. “The relief effort will still be here a year from now.” The goal of the map will be to help coordinate activities as reconstruction continues in the future.
The map is the first part of a larger mapping platform, called the NGO Aid Map, which will include not only the Haiti aid map but also projects working on food security in other developing countries. The food security map is due to be launched in March 2011.
Sources: Clinton Foundation, InterAction, NPR, ReliefWeb, USIP.
Image Credit: Adapted from Haiti Aid Map. -
Andrew Morton, UNEP
Haiti 2011: Looking One Year Back and Twenty Years Forward
›January 14, 2011 // By Wilson Center StaffThis piece first appeared on the website of the Haiti Regeneration Initiative – a new collaborative venture between the UN, the government of Haiti, the Earth Institute at Columbia University, Catholic Relief Services, and a wide range of other implementing partners.
In 2010, Haiti endured a year like no other. The country was struck by a devastating earthquake, a cholera epidemic, floods, violence, and political uncertainty. At the same time, Haiti witnessed heroic rescue and relief efforts and an enormous demonstration of international goodwill. Today, recovery and reconstruction are taking place, albeit at a frustratingly slow pace and not currently at the scale of existing needs.
Just as importantly, 2010 brought a renewed awareness of the need for lasting solutions and improvements in the design and delivery of international aid. During the next few days, we will look back on the tragic events of January 12th, 2010, while at the same time, we must look forward, not just one year, but 20.
A Failed Recovery in a Fragile State
Already before the earthquake, Haiti was a fragile state trapped in a slow but vicious negative spiral. A tightly interconnected trio of chronic environmental, political, and socio-economic crises has gradually ensured that Haiti has had the lowest human development indicators in the Western Hemisphere, with life-long poverty, chronic hunger, and violence. Catastrophic events, such as natural disasters, epidemics, and political violence, have simply steepened the descent. Moreover, disaster recovery efforts to date have systematically failed to bring the country back to pre-disaster levels.
In spite of this depressing analysis and forecast, we should not resign ourselves to failure. The situation can be turned around but only with great effort and by foregoing “business as usual.”
The first step towards change is full recognition of the situation. In the case of Haiti, this means recognizing the marked failure of foreign recovery and development assistance to date. It is pointless to blame any particular institution or individual for this: The current state of Haiti is the culmination of generations of efforts and decisions, good and bad, combined with rapid population growth and an inherent vulnerability to natural hazards. (Editor’s note: according to the UN, Haiti’s fertility rate tripled in the immediate aftermath of the earthquake last year.)
The second step is planning. While relatively solid recovery plans have been developed by the government of Haiti with international assistance, their implementation has not so far met with success, due to four interlinked problems.
First, the humanitarian imperative for urgent and chronic relief is overrunning all good intentions for recovery and development – it is politically impossible, inhumane, and simply unwise to ignore the basic resource needs of a cholera epidemic and a million people living in tents.
Second, nothing suppresses development investments like political violence and uncertainty: Few donors, and even fewer companies, will invest while riots and political uncertainty paralyze the country and destroy its reputation.
Third, the planning process is necessarily democratic and participatory; as a result, however, virtually all of the country’s needs are listed with no reliable process of thematic or geographic prioritization.
Finally – and perhaps most importantly – although the plans are official and uncontested, they generally lack broad credibility and commitment. Weary aid workers, government officials, donors and the general public look back at the fate of previous plans and, not surprisingly, expect these latest efforts to fail just as others have before.
Regenerating Haiti
Unlike virtually all other aid organizations I have met in Haiti, the team behind the Haiti Regeneration Initiative (HRI) has fortunately been given the vital time and seed funding to reflect on these issues and try something really different. After two years of preparation, on January 4, 2010, we launched a long-term rural sustainable development initiative for the southwestern tip of Haiti. The Côte Sud Initiative aims to transform the lives and the degraded environment of 200,000 people living in one of the poorest yet most beautiful parts of Haiti.
This specific initiative will only directly assist two percent of the population of Haiti, but just as importantly, we aim to demonstrate that sustainable development is truly possible in this country. Because national-scale issues require national-scale efforts, we also aim to promote change through dialogue and assisting the government of Haiti to develop and deliver on sustainable development plans that work. This is the primary mission of the HRI.
We must arrest the long-term decline as soon as possible. This includes, but is not limited to, basic recovery from the earthquake. At the same time, we need to establish the foundations for the long-term radical changes that are an absolute prerequisite to achieving sustainable development in Haiti. We must prepare to turn the vicious circles into virtuous ones.
So what are the short- to medium-term priorities?
The first is political stabilization, as vital foreign aid and direct foreign investment will simply not arrive in the face of such negative news and uncertainty.
Second, a massive aid investment in potable water and sanitation is required to suppress cholera in the longer term. No country can develop in the midst of recurrent major epidemics. This investment needs to be designed for sustainability; in other words, infrastructure needs to be accompanied by realistic, locally financed mechanisms for maintenance. Otherwise it will become useless within weeks of installation.
Third, persistence is needed on the current debris clearance and rebuilding efforts; we know from many other countries that such efforts can take years to be completed.
Finally, development aid should move out of Port-au-Prince and into the regions. In 2010, the massive influx of earthquake relief and reconstruction aid actually increased the economic pull of the capital and exacerbated existing urban problems.
What to do to prepare for the long term? Implementing radical change requires political support and even cultural reform, so in addition to good ideas, the HRI partnership will work hard to develop a sense of national ownership of the solutions as well as the problems.
Many of the ideas are not new: mildly decentralized development, diversified and value-added agriculture, niche tourism, improved aid coordination, public-private partnerships, etc.
Many, however, are radical, including a proposed paradigm change on migration and remittances, education, food security and import policies, widespread privatization, harsh revisions and rebuttals of traditional development models and assumptions, and adaptation to the new types of religious NGOs. These are just a few of the concepts and opportunities we have identified and will work to make a reality in Haiti.
Over the next few years, the HRI hopes to foster an intelligent and useful dialogue on sustainable development in Haiti. We look forward to having all of those who are concerned about and interested in helping Haiti join us in the debate.
Andrew Morton is the Haiti Regeneration coordinator and a senior staff member at UNEP. For more information on the Haiti Regeneration Initiative please see www.haitiregeneration.org.
Sources: BBC, Haiti Regeneration Initiative, United Nations Development Programme.
Image Credit: “Rebuilding as a community,” courtesy of flickr user Save the Children. -
Environmental Security at the UN
UNEP/PCDMB Progress Report From Brussels
›January 11, 2011 // By Lauren Herzer RisiAt a November Environmental Security Assessments conference on methodologies and practices, held jointly by ENVSEC and IES outside of Brussels, I had the opportunity to catch up with David Jensen, a policy and planning coordinator in the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) Post Conflict and Disaster Management Branch (PCDMB).
Jensen pointed to several upcoming reports coming from UNEP and expressed some relief that the concept of environmental security was finally getting some recognition without having to constantly be “banging on doors.”
PCDMB is a branch of UNEP created to provide five core services to UN member states: post-crisis environmental assessments; post-crisis environmental recovery; environmental cooperation for peacebuilding; disaster risk reduction; and, most recently, humanitarian action and early recovery.
There has been a steady stream of activity flowing from PCDMB and a lot to look forward to this spring:
Finally, it sounds like PCDMB is getting some recognition from within the upper echelons of the UN. Jensen has been asked to brief senior peacebuilding officials, and the Secretary-General’s political advisor called him in to talk about peacekeeping and natural resource management and conflict prevention.- The guidance notes on conflict prevention and natural resources, recently published on the PCDMB website, are draft notes that will be revised following pilot programs in four countries (Jensen particularly noted that there is much work to be done on them still). Ultimately, they hope to identify funding for 100 experts to deploy to countries (at the country’s request) to apply the guidance notes in the field.
- PCDMB has a project of 150 case studies coming out in six volumes in February 2011 on natural resources and peacebuilding.
- The culmination of a three-year UNEP project in Nigeria, which includes a full analysis and remediation plan of 300 oil-contaminated sites in the Ogoniland region of the Niger Delta, is expected to be released in the second quarter of 2011. (Editor’s note: though not finished, the report caught flack last summer over concerns that it will largely exonerate Shell.)
- PCDMB is also partnering with UN’s Department of Peacekeeping Operations and the Department of Field Support to assess options for resource-efficient technologies and practices in peacekeeping camps (the so-called “green helmets“). They will be issuing a policy report on best practices in May 2011.
In an interview with ECSP last fall, Jensen predicted the UN was finally approaching a fundamental tipping point for inclusion of natural resource issues in the broader peacebuilding process, and the kind of interest noted above appears to be proving him right.
In a report this summer, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted the need for inclusion of environmental security in peacekeeping operations and highlighted the particular work of PCDMB in places like Afghanistan, Timor-Leste, and the Sudan.
It’s no surprise then that when Jensen briefed the full Secretariat, he said he was greeted by a packed house.
Image Credit: Arranged from “UNEP and Disasters and Conflicts at a Glance,” courtesy of UNEP. -
The Cholera Quandary
›The original version of this article first appeared in the Stimson Center Spotlight series, November 19, 2010.
Cholera is usually seen as one of the most devastating infections of the 19th century. Trade routes carried cholera from India to the great cities of Europe and the United States. Disease, fear, and political unrest spread in great waves that cost millions of lives. After much destruction, it was only with science and resources that certain populations were able to curb the epidemic.One of the most celebrated lessons in the history of public health involves a cholera outbreak in London in 1854 and efforts by John Snow – celebrated as the father of epidemiology – to control it. At the time, it was not clear that cholera was a waterborne bacterial infection that caused severe diarrhea and vomiting, and sometimes fatal dehydration. Snow proved that the outbreaks decimating communities spread from contaminated water. Water and sanitation services had virtually eliminated cholera epidemics in the developed world by the early 1900s.
Today, cholera has been nearly eradicated in the developed world, but continues to be endemic in poorer countries. Risks seem to be rising as larger populations are crowded into unsanitary conditions. The World Health Organization (WHO) estimates three to five million illnesses and 100,000-200,000 deaths from cholera each year. If caught early, infections are treatable with inexpensive oral rehydration solutions. For much of the world, these options are unavailable or underused – the mere presence of cholera serves as an indicator of a country’s socioeconomic status and health system capabilities.
The cholera epidemics that are currently menacing countries on three different continents – Asia, Africa, and North America – raise tough questions about what is required to protect the world’s vulnerable populations. We know how to predict the crisis of cholera, prevent outbreaks, and contain them when they occur. To control cholera, what is needed is not cutting-edge technologies, but will, transparency, and resources – and where cholera appears, at least one of these three factors has failed.
Currently, cholera outbreaks in Pakistan, Haiti, and Nigeria are piling misery upon misery. Cholera in post-flood Pakistan comes as no surprise. When floodwaters left millions homeless and without access to clean drinking water in a region where cholera remains endemic, health officials could have reasonably assumed infected human waste would seep into water supplies and spread disease. The inability of health networks on the ground to prevent and then detect cholera demonstrates cracks in the country’s health system. What is apparent here is a lack of will and resources. Disease surveillance is especially vital in a post-disaster scenario where steps can be taken, such as treating water with chlorine, to prevent an outbreak.
Haiti had been free of cholera for at least 50 years, but the disease struck and spread rapidly 10 months after the devastating January 2010 earthquake. It reached Haiti’s capital and spread to its neighbor, the Dominican Republic. Since October, more than 114,000 people have become ill and more than 2,500 have died (Editor’s note: updated since original publication).
Haiti lacked resources for basic infrastructure even prior to the earthquake; the cholera crisis is not only costing lives, but also diverting aid from “building back better.” But regardless of the source of the cholera strain, if basic infrastructure and resources to protect Haiti’s vulnerable populations had been in place, cholera’s re-emergence would have been far less devastating.
This particular outbreak draws attention to the practical and political challenges of identifying health risks in humanitarian workers and peacekeepers, many of whom come from developing countries themselves. Evidence suggests that peacekeepers from Nepal, housed at a UN base, may have been the source of the outbreak clustered around the Artibonite River. Cholera outbreaks frequently exacerbate frictions between communities and aid workers – suspicions that have led to riots and murder more than once in recent years. At least two people were killed in Haiti in riots with peacekeepers during November.The delayed decision by the UN to investigate whether the outbreak originated with peacekeepers may have conserved resources for the race to stave off more cases, but did little to build trust between communities and foreign workers. Further violence and protests surrounding the recent disputed presidential election in Haiti do little to ease the devastation and in fact, threaten the relief effort. There has been discussion in Congress of cutting direct aid and suspending visas for Haitian officials until the dispute as been resolved. The Organization of American States is now reviewing the results.
In Africa, Nigeria is experiencing its worst cholera outbreak since 1991, and the disease is crossing borders. An onslaught of cases raised the 2010 death toll to more than 1,500 fatalities out of 40,000 cases. This mortality rate is three times higher than the seasonal cholera outbreaks of 2009, and seven times higher than 2008. Despite Nigeria’s oil wealth, most of the population is impoverished. Two-thirds of rural Nigerians lack access to safe drinking water and fewer than 40 percent of people in cholera-affected areas have access to toilet facilities, according to the Nigerian Health Ministry. A combined lack of will, transparency, and resources mean that cholera epidemics occur annually, and in clusters throughout sub-Saharan Africa.
A century and a half after John Snow’s discovery, we know how to control cholera. Globally, the resources exist, but the question of a collective will remains. For those who lack clean water to drink, to wash, or even proper toilets, the gap between knowing and doing is not easily closed. The international community has shown repeatedly that it can confront cholera outbreaks like those in Haiti, Pakistan, and Nigeria in the midst of crisis. The question remains as to how those efforts can eliminate the conditions that fostered outbreaks in the first place. The answer is not as riveting as the causes that often receive funding: basic infrastructure and resources. Roads, wells, clean water, toilets, education, and the willingness to recognize that if the foundation is not sound, nothing will be able to stand. Sometimes the simplest problems are the most difficult to solve.
Sarah Kornblet is a research fellow at the Global Health Security Program at the Stimson Center. Her research focuses on the International Health Regulations, health systems strengthening, global health diplomacy, the intersection of public health and security, and the potential for innovative and dynamic health policy solutions in developing countries.
Sources: Agence France-Presse, BBC, Washington Post, World Health Organization.
Photo Credit: “UN Peacekeepers Provide Security During Port-au-Prince Food Distribution,” courtesy of flickr user United Nations Photo. -
Judith Bruce on Empowering Adolescent Girls in Post-Earthquake Haiti
›“The most striking thing about post-conflict and post-disaster environments is that what lurks there is also this extraordinary opportunity,” said Judith Bruce, a senior associate and policy analyst with the Population Council’s Poverty, Gender, and Youth program. Bruce has spent time this year working with the Haiti Adolescent Girls Network (HAGN), a coalition of humanitarian groups conducting workshops focused on the educational, health, and security needs of the country’s vulnerable female youth population.
Gender-based violence has long been an issue in Haiti, but the problem became even more pronounced in the wake of the January earthquake. HAGN has sought to address the problem by concentrating its community-based programming on “high priority” groups, including girls who are disabled, serve as de facto heads of households, or are aged 10-14.
Bruce asserted that protecting and empowering young girls is critical because upon reaching puberty, “their access to a safe world shrinks dramatically.” With the post-disaster environment adding another layer of challenge, she said “there could be no ambiguity in anyone’s mind that we have to create dedicated spaces for girls who, at least for a few hours a week, feel secure to be themselves and to plan for their long-term safety as well as their development.”
The “Pop Audio” series is also available as podcasts on iTunes. -
Rebuilding Stronger, Safer, Environmentally Sustainable Communities After Disasters
The GRRT Toolkit for Humanitarian Aid
›Natural disasters present an immediate humanitarian crisis but are also an opportunity to rebuild societies to be more resilient and environmentally sustainable than they were before. The “Green Recovery and Reconstruction Training Toolkit” (GRRT), created by World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the American Red Cross and launched at the Wilson Center on November 19, will help future humanitarian efforts integrate principles of environmental conservation into their disaster recovery strategies. This strategic partnership has been “an incredible effort and marriage between organizations that have different operating styles, different approaches to situations,” said WWF Chief Operating Officer Marcia Marsh. While implementing the GRRT may not be easy, “we need integrated solutions for integrated problems,” said Erika Clesceri, bureau environmental officer at USAID.
A Critical Partnership
In the midst of a crisis, humanitarian workers on the ground often do not have the time, skills, or funding to incorporate environmental concerns into relief efforts, said Robert Laprade, senior director for emergencies and humanitarian assistance at CARE. Humanitarian workers are “going a hundred miles an hour, they’re going on adrenaline and they’re there to save people’s lives – and the environment is just of secondary importance,” he said.
But “environmental sustainability is critical to the achievement of long-lasting recovery results,” said Roger Lowe, senior vice president of communications at American Red Cross. The Red Cross Principles of Conduct state that “relief aid must strive to reduce future vulnerabilities to disaster as well as meeting basic needs” and “avoid long-term beneficiary dependence upon external aid,” he said.
From Damnation, Purgatory, and Armageddon to Redemption
For many crisis-stricken regions, lack of an emphasis on environmental sustainability during disaster recovery efforts can mean “damnation in the present, purgatory in the near future, and Armageddon in the long term,” said Peter Walker, director of the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University. Stress on the environment caused by climate change or unsustainable resource consumption can often contribute to conflict, he explained.
In Darfur, “the environmental change was part and parcel of what led to that conflict,” Walker said. At one time an “environmental Eden” of diverse ecological zones, Darfur gradually became an environment that could not support a society of livestock herding. As the environment changed, some former herders became salaried, armed gunmen, known as the Janjaweed who felt they faced “a choice of no choice,” Walker said, to either “die as pastoralists or become pariahs as mercenaries.”
The challenge for humanitarian aid organizations is to not only help communities recover from disasters, but help them adapt to future environmental stress caused by globalization, climate change, or other factors. “If you cannot adapt,” Walker said, “that’s going to lead to violence.” To avoid aid dependency or resurgence in conflict it is critical to integrate environmental sustainability into disaster relief efforts from the beginning, he said:We used to believe that our world in the aid business was divided between relief on the left and long-term development on the right, and one would gradually go into the other in this relief-development continuum. But the reality is that you have a significant population – a population of millions of people – who are effectively trapped in a form of aid purgatory. They’re basically on a drip feed. Humanitarian assistance does not get you forward, it keeps you alive.
The GRRT offers organizations guidelines for implementing integrated disaster relief to provide a sustainable solution. While every crisis is different, the GRRT’s guidelines should be as applicable to “flooding in Boston as they are to flooding in Aceh,” said Walker.
Implementing Integrated Solutions
Securing funding for this integrated approach will be a challenge, as a significant portion will go towards staffing and training people on the ground, said Clesceri. A stand-alone, dedicated budget for environmental issues within humanitarian assistance programs must “be fought and re-fought for on a continual basis,” she said.
Local partnerships are essential. “Replicate” should be “stricken from the lexicon,” said Marsh. “You can’t replicate, and this toolkit isn’t meant to be a one-size-fits-all.” Instead, she said, the goal of the GRRT is to “create very practical approaches with communities.”
The key to helping communities recover from disasters is to form the kinds of strategic partnerships demonstrated by WWF and the American Red Cross in the creation of the GRRT. “Interdisciplinary groups are always, in my mind, going to get you a better solution in the end, but the risk is that they take more time…but it’s absolutely worth it,” she said.
Photo Credit: “Dark Clouds from Haiti’s Hurricane Tomas Loom over Camps,” courtesy of flickr user United Nations Photo.
